The Character Designs of 'Mulan'

A still from Mulan (1998)Welcome! This is a new Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and our plan goes like this:1. On Chen-Yi Chang’s designs for Mulan.2. Newsbits in animation.With that, let’s go!1. What Chen-Yi Chang didMulan is a well-designed film. It’s been said many times, but it’s worth repeating. In style, the project was possibly Disney’s most ambitious and different of the ‘90s, during its renaissance era. The artists really did something.One of them was Hans Bacher, the production designer, whose work on the film we’ve covered before. Mulan “still was supposed to be a Disney movie,” he wrote — but one mixed with aesthetic ideas from China. In his style guides, online here and here, Bacher explained in painstaking detail what that meant.1 But Bacher didn’t create the look by himself. Maybe even more crucial to Mulan’s style was the character designer, Chen-Yi Chang. “I could not have designed Mulan without him,” Bacher wrote. “He very patiently explained…